An Ambivalent Woman of 37

An award-winning ballet dancer, Emma here presents an excellent stage persona in this self-devised and performed autobiographical, multi-media, musical show – inspired and liberally quoting from Sheila Heti’s famous book: Motherhood.

A swan? I couldn't sense any underwater turbulence!  And she had to be far more than a conductor: to conceive, nursemaid, direct and feature in a very nuanced performance where there was 'nowhere to hide'.  One woman!  It's an extraordinary feat, and to capture the audience completely for the full time.  Elena Kats-Chernin deserves to be sainted for this and her other wonderful contributions over decades; and pianist Yanghee Kim gifted an understated sort of motherly presence, and served for asides and as a direct base from time to time.

As you’d expect, Emma moves beautifully and occupies the stage; she’s very watchable, and surely she must have some futuristic hydraulic valves or such to enable her liquid movements, particularly her arms. Not to mention demonstrating the magic of those extraordinary high heels that Friday-night girls hobble about in.  When inserted into the space between the floor and a balanced and slender body, stiletto heels create primal heaven-on-a-stick.  I also thought Emma delivered her singing with conviction and it landed well.

One of the neat concepts that recurs in Heti's book and that Emma weaves into her clever adaptation is "the doing vs the having".  She has also leavened Heti's prose cleverly to give it some 'air', folding it through with effective backdrops – many charmingly naïf.  They give the production a depth and dimension; recurrence of the movements that illustrate the pressure of time were a strong underpinning current.  The lighting was riveting: I was struck by particular illumination of Emma where half of her was blue and half blue and black stripes (I'm sure a lighting consultant wouldn't have described it thus!), but the lighting was original and a vector for setting mood and changing atmosphere.

Motherhood is a very large and consuming subject, and most powerful, I think, are the attitudes, expectations and difficulties surrounding a woman's conceiving, birthing and nurturing a child, and resolving the precepts of raising it/them and yet managing a balanced life.  As a subject for exegesis on stage, it’s a challenge and in this intriguing new work, Emma does an excellent job.

Kerrie Eyers

Photographer: Taylor Phoenix